This was an interesting for me. In terms of KA, I actually got a decent amount of work done getting through two units in the 4th Grade Reading and Vocab course. The disappointing part, however, is that I’m guessing I only studied for between three and four hours. 👎🏼 As I mentioned last week, I find it difficult to push myself to watch the videos, read the articles, and do the exercises when the material being covered is so simple. It gets a bit dull after a while, but I did learn a handful of things that I didn’t know about, so I had that going for me which was nice. But the reason why this week was interesting was because I found out about a relatively new private school called Alpha which is opening up new campuses in the USA. It’s a school that apparently uses EdTech and AI to teach their students, and the teachers (or “Guides” as Alpha calls them) are there more to mentor and coach the kids rather than teach them using the traditional 30 to 1 teacher to student ratio where the teacher has a single lesson plan for all 30 kids. I’ll explain why this excited me at the end of the post, but suffice it to say I’m starting to image a path I could take moving forward that would bring EVERYTHING I’ve been working on over the past few years between KA, CK, and coaching kids together! 🤯
I started this week on the unit test of Unit 2, Key Ideas and Details:
Unit 2 – Key Ideas and Details
Unit Test
Question 1
This unit test took me ~15 minutes to get through. I got a question wrong on my first attempt, so it took me two tries. It wasn’t hard, but I started to realize that I was skimming each question more than I should. I began slowing down a bit when reading and trying to concentrate a bit more on actually understanding what the questions were communicating and — surprise surprise — the questions become much easier.
Unit 3 – Key Ideas and Details: Long Passage Practice
Exercise: Snowbird and the Water-Tiger
Question 2
In this exercise, there was a story given (which you can see on the right side of the screenshot above) and all the questions were related to that particular story. The exercise wasn’t hard, but I’d never seen an exercise formatted like this, so I figured I’d add it to this post just for the novelty of it.
Unit 4 – Craft and Structure
Video – Using Word Parts to Determine Meaning
This video was VERY interesting to me and answered a question I’ve had for a long time: what are the different parts of words called? The answer: “word parts”. 😂 I knew about prefixes and suffixes, but I didn’t know that ‘roots’ was the third word part. Well, actually I knew about roots, but I didn’t know that ‘roots’ was the third and only other word part. Word parts are very interesting to me. There’s so much hidden depth and meaning in words based on how they’ve come together as the English language evolved. It seems to me that the more I can learn about the individual word parts, the more meaning I’ll be able to easily extract from other words that USE those word parts.
Video – The Structures of Informational Texts
In this video, David went through the five ‘text structures’ shown in the screenshot and in my notes above. It wasn’t anything ground-breaking for me — if I was asked for their definitions before watching the vid, I would have been able to give more or less the same definitions for each text structure that he gave — but I’d never really thought about writing with a specific kind of structure, so it was interesting to think about. It also got me thinking that maybe I should be speaking with a kind of structure in mind. 🤔 Or at the least, if I studied these writing structures and tried to used them when speaking, it might make the things I talk about easier for people to understand.
Exercise – Text Structure
Question 3
Question 4
This exercise was pretty straightforward. Before doing it, I’d also watched a video and read an article about the different types of writing — prose, poems, and stage writing — so the exercise just went through those structures and storytelling techniques. One thing I’m starting to notice and get better at (I think) is actually paying attention to the what I’m reading. I very often read things without thinking about what I’m reading. Then, I get to the end of a paragraph, have no clue what I just read, and have to go back and reread the entire thing. 😒 Working through this course, I think I’m starting to get better at focusing on what I’m reading right from the first sentence. If this is true and I can teach myself to actually pay attention to the things I read when I’m reading them, that would be a HUGE game changer for me!
That was everything I made notes on this week, but FYI, there were a bunch of other videos, articles, and exercises I worked through but just didn’t make notes on!
I now have three units left to get through in this course. I’m hoping I can get through all of them this coming week which I think might be a stretch, but the reality is it would probably only take around 5 hours to do it, so it should be within reach. I’m also super motivated right now to get through KA because of what I learned about this week re: the Alpha school. I saw job postings for their Guide positions which started at 100K USD. 😳 I filled out an application for one of the positions but it got rejected because they’re only hiring people that are legally allowed to work in the USA. 👎🏼 Nonetheless, in the brief research I’ve done, I’ve learned that 1) Alpha is expanding across the United States, and 2) the school is ALL about using EdTech (like KA) for mastery learning. If EdTech gets proven to produce better results than traditional education, after having spent 367 weeks using EdTech myself, I feel like I’d be in a pretty good position to leverage my experience into some sort of opportunity. It could be wishful thinking, but Alpha is clearly running this experiment, so I’m VERY interested to see how it plays out. 👀
So, as always (but maybe more than ever), my fingers are crossed that I can have a productive upcoming week and make some decent progress so I can get through ELA and PROVE that EdTech is the future of education! 🤞🏼